The Talisman

six, Jack had put his finger on the cold coil of an electric range and had then turned the control knob onto the HIGH setting. He had simply been curious about how fast the burner would heat up. A second later he had pulled his finger, already blistering, away with a yell of pain. Phil Sawyer had come running, taken a look, and had asked Jack when he had started to feel this weird compulsion to burn himself alive.
    Jack stood with Richard in his arms, looking at the dully glowing handles.
    Go on, little boy. Remember how the stove burned? You thought you’d have plenty of time to pull your finger off – ‘Hell,’ you thought, ‘the thing doesn’t even start to get red for almost a minute’ – but it burned right away, didn’t it? Now, how do you think this is going to feel, Jack?
    More red sparks skated liquidly down the glass to the handles of the French doors. The handles began to take on the delicate red-edged-with-white look of metal which is no more than six degrees from turning molten and starting to drip. If he touched one of those handles it would sink into his flesh, charring tissue and boiling blood. The agony would be like nothing he had ever felt before.
    He waited for a moment with Richard in his arms, hoping the Talisman would call him again, or that the ‘Jasonside’ of him would surface. But it was his mother’s voice that rasped in his head.
    Has something or someone always got to push you, Jack-O? Come on, big guy – you set this going by yourself; you can keep going if you really want to. Has that other guy got to do everything for you?
    ‘Okay, Mom,’ Jack said: He was smiling a little, but his voice was trembling with fright. ‘Here’s one for you. I just hope someone remembered to pack the Solarcaine.’
    He reached out and grasped one of the red-hot handles.
    Except it wasn’t; the whole thing had been an illusion. The handle was warm, but that was all. As Jack turned it, the red glow died from all the handles. And as he pushed the glass door inward, the Talisman sang out again, bringing gooseflesh out all over his body:
    WELL DONE! JASON! TO ME! COME TO ME!
    With Richard in his arms, Jack stepped into the dining room of the black hotel.
    3
    As he crossed the threshold, he felt an inanimate force – something like a dead hand – try to shove him back out. Jack pushed against it, and a second or two later, that feeling of being repelled ceased.
    The room was not particularly dark – but the soaped windows gave it a monochrome whiteness Jack did not like. He felt fogged in, blind. Here were yellow smells of decay inside walls where the plaster was slowly turning to a vile soup: the smells of empty age and sour darkness. But there was more here, and Jack knew it and feared it.
    Because this place was not empty.
    Exactly what manner of things might be here he did not know – but he knew that Sloat had never dared to come in, and he guessed that no one else would, either. The air was heavy and unpleasant in his lungs, as if filled with a slow poison. He felt the strange levels and canted passageways and secret rooms and dead ends above him pressing down like the walls of a great and complex crypt. There was madness here, and walking death, and gibbering irrationality. Jack might not have had the words to express these things, but he felt them, all the same . . . he knew them for what they were. Just as he knew that all the Talismans in the cosmos could not protect him from those things. He had entered a strange, dancing ritual whose conclusion, he felt, was not at all preordained.
    He was on his own.
    Something tickled against the back of his neck. Jack swept his hand at it and skittered to one side. Richard moaned thickly in his arms.
    It was a large black spider hanging on a thread. Jack looked up and saw its web in one of the stilled overhead fans, tangled in a dirty snarl between the hardwood blades. The spider’s body was bloated. Jack could see its eyes. He couldn’t remember ever having seen a spider’s eyes before. Jack began to edge around the hanging spider toward the tables. The spider turned at the end of its thread, following him.
    ‘Fushing feef !’ it suddenly squealed at him.
    Jack screamed and clutched Richard against him with panicky, galvanic force. His scream echoed across the high-ceilinged dining room. Somewhere in the shadows beyond, there was a hollow metallic clank, and something laughed.
    ‘ Fushing feef, fushing FEEF! ’ the spider squealed,